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by christophilus 30 days ago
That would be ok in a non-globalized world. In our world, any country that implements those laws will see a lot more offshoring.
4 comments

Not if that country also legislates heavy penalties for companies that produce their goods in countries with worse labor laws.
The economic motive for offshoring would remain (though slightly mitigated), unless that country’s demand (in each regulated sector) was much more than rest of the world’s. I personally doubt that most places are even willing to implement such legislation, given that they’re not even willing to protest PRoC’s use of slave labor and prison camps.
You're just going to Galapagos your economy. Consumers won't put up with high prices and inferior goods. Unless you want to restrict internet/information access so your consumers don't know what they are missing out on.
I dunno. Consumers put up with a lot. Why can't I buy a cheap Chinese EV again?
Well the short version is that Robert Rubin and company sold our industries for parts years and years ago. And now we have to rebuild the industrial base from scratch
That should make it possible to buy a cheap Chinese EV.

You can't because they didn't sell out completely. In fact they still have some power to protect the companies from foreign products.

The result is a mishmash of protectionism and globalization.

Nah, I live in the UK, prices are higher than eu, public service is much worse, but public are voting for the party with members that brought this about.

Humans are weird.

Voting for someone else would mean admitting you were wrong.

Paying high prices and losing your job are bad, but not as bad as changing your mind.

Almost like we needed some international worker's organization to put pressure on all relevant countries at the same time...
Hey don’t go talking crazy about some kind of global labor solidarity and collective bargaining
So then all the productivity improvements are nothing more than boosting the hashrate of your crypto miner? You have to do it to not fall behind, but once everyone has done it, we all end up back in the same spot where we started?
Unironically, yes. One saving grace is in some ways, such as medicine and technology, more will be available to you, but not for less effort.
It's kind of understandable then that parts of the younger generations aren't motivated to continue that system? (Not just in the West, also in China, see "lying flat")
Normal people, yes. The oligarchic class gets more and more bloated as you can plainly see.
Hey, if fuel gets expensive enough this will be much less of a problem! Let's all thank Trump and Iran for their great work on bringing the four day work week closer to fruition. This isn't how I would've imagined bringing industry back to the States, but it's a promise made, promise kept.
Has the promise been kept? Is industry on-shoring in any significant sense? Or just making photo ops for Trump and fam, then slow walking the implementation until it's quietly canceled or scaled back to a token effort?
The joke is that onshoring will be forced to occur when global trade becomes prohibitively expensive for most goods. A promise kept despite not planning to, and with catastrophic consequences.
This has the same energy as "if we tax the billionaires, they'll leave". That statement and yours are wrong. Why? Because if it was profitable, they would've done it already. Pretty much any employer would use you as fertilizer if there was an uptick in the stock price.

But let's say it's true. Great. Punish them with tariffs. They also have diminished political power because they're no longer a local employer.

We are colletively at a breaking point as a society where people legitimately can't afford to exist in a society that will soon mint its first trillionaire. This is beyond even French revolution levels of wealth inequality.

Fully agreed.

“Oh but businesses will leave”

Yeah so what, if they do, we either didn’t want them, or they _actually won’t_ despite the squealing, or they will go, and if their segment of the market is useful, will get snapped up by new/local versions which do respect local constraints from the get-go.

All of these are better outcomes than not doing anything because “what if”.

That only works with tariffs, which are widely considered evil apparently.
> We are colletively at a breaking point as a society where people legitimately can't afford to exist in a society

Aren't poverty rates being reduced basically everywhere and people getting richer across all deciles? The truth is that even if 90% tax rate was enforceable it would not change much - many problems plaguing societies right now are due to bad legislation and NIMBYs, with housing being the prime example. Somehow people want at same time: more houses, cheaper housing and as little new housing development as possible.